On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, olivier Thereaux wrote:
> I think I don't actually agree with the suggestion given by the warning
> message. Especially when looking at the Colors section of CSS21 [1] I don't
> see any suggestion to use mixed case for legibility. The only mention of case
> in the spec, AFAIK, is that most of CSS is case-insensitive. [2]
>
> I will ask the CSS working group for their opinion, and the original creators
> of the validator for the rationale behind this warning, but would be
> interested to hear opinions from this mailing-list.
I think this issue was discussed earlier in the list, but it might have
been elsewhere. Anyway, color names should _not_ be capitalized, as that
would pointlessly deviate from common CSS practice of writing keywords in
all lowercase and would slightly _reduce_ readability, since it is not
common to write color names that way.
All the CSS 2 names are short, and when interpreted as English words, none
of them are compounds. The proposed CSS 3 color names (which reflect
existing browser practices but are hardly useful) contain many compounds,
and for _them_ it might be argued that legibility is slightly increased by
using uppercase at the start of each part of the compound except possibly
the first one, e.g. LightSeaGreen or lightSeaGreen. But capitalizing the
_first_ letter is really irrelevant here.
On the other hand, it would be disproportionate to give a warning (in
either direction) about things like case of letters in case-insensitive
constructs. It would reduce the credibility of other, much more important
warnings.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/